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BBC's Zimbabwe report

Like most Zimbabweans, I was thoroughly disappointed by John Simpson's vacuous undercover report on Zimbabwe on the BBC Ten O'clock News on Monday. The Beeb's newsflash earlier in the day had got Zimbaz in the UK animatedly texting one another over the impending revelations at 10 O'clock, only to find that Simpson's secret presence inside the country was itself THE news! As many Zimbabwean journalists have observed, there was nothing new in the Beeb's report. Simpson simply regurgitated the litany of challenges that now characterise daily life in Zimbabwe - something that both the Zimbabwean press and its online counterpart chronicle daily. In fact, with respect to international coverage of the humanitarian crisis, Mark Austin's special report on Zimbabwe for ITV back in September last year was more revealing and informative. What had captured the attention of most Zimbabweans wa the claim in Simpson's report that they could 'confirm' the emergence of a rival party from within Mugabe's ruling Zanu PF. That bit had also been broken by the two leading weeklies inside the country earlier that week - The Financial Gazette and The Zimbabwe Independent. However, none of the main movers and shakers of this new initiative have come on record to confirm it and when Simpson was said to have jetted in we all had the assumption that we were for the first time going to see Simba Makoni or his co-plotters categorically confirming their political ambitions. As it turned out, nothing in Simpson's report put the speculation beyond question and would have to look to the Zimbabwean press which broke the story in the first place to furnish us with more details. Meanwhile, Simpson's left Zimbabwe to its poverty and desperation, having notched up for himself a few kudos for 'bravery' for defying Mugabe's ban!

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They can't out-vote Joice's camp and they don't have the numbers to carry through all those amendments to the party constitution that they propose to do. On those amendments too, it should trouble anyone in Zanu that they're really seeking to create a highly centralised power structure in which the leader effectively becomes the party, just as Zvobgo's problematic amendments to the national constitution concentrated executive powers in the office of the president.

These enormous powers are in effect not really meant for Mugabe, but for the one who will soon take over from him. And the question is, why would they bend over backwards, cede their power to block this, and allow the Mnangagwa faction to reshape the party stru…

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